Free Republic

It’s been almost five years since the passage of the Affordable Care Act and its promise to “bend the cost curve downward” for Americans and their health care. More than five years have passed since the technical start of the recovery and the Obama administration’s bragging about jobs and economic expansion. The two combined should produce noticeable improvement in the lives of Americans, yes? According to the latest CBS News poll, no (via Jeff Dunetz): Fifty-two percent of Americans say they find basic medical care affordable, but that’s down from 61 percent last December. Today, for 46 percent of...

Richard C. Hottelet, the last of the original "Murrow's Boys," the pioneering group of wartime journalists hired by CBS radio newsman Edward R. Murrow, has died. He was 97. CBS News spokesman Kevin Tedesco said that Hottelet died early Wednesday morning at his home in Wilton. Hottelet was a foreign correspondent for the United Press in Berlin at the start of World War II ? and even spent several months in a Nazi prison ? before joining CBS in London in 1944. He reported from many battlefronts, and went on to become CBS' correspondent for the United Nations, an assignment...

The journalists at CBS This Morning on Monday compared the violent, bloody attacks on African Americans during civil rights marches in 1965 to voter ID laws passed by various states in the last few years. Co-anchor Norah O'Donnell talked to Oprah Winfrey, producer/star of the new film Selma. O'Donnell marveled, "...Given the Voting Rights Act, 1965, I went back and looked. Thirteen states have passed more restrictive voter ID laws in the last three years, that states are trying to make it harder to vote." [MP3 audio here.]Actor David Oyelowo, who plays Martin Luther King in the film, slammed the...

On Friday evening, the Senate's leaders, Mitch McConnell and and Harry Reid thought they had an agreement from their members to let the clock run over the weekend without actually being in session, and vote Monday on the $1.1 trillion spending bill needed to keep the government up and running. But Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Mike Lee of Utah objected to the spending bill. This meant their colleagues in the Senate would have to hold a rare Saturday session to keep the spending bill moving. It also had the unintended benefit of helping the Democrats move forward with...

WHO NEEDS THE TRUTH?: Dan Rather had to explain CBS’ fake story about President Bush 10 years ago. The Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house at the University of Virginia has since suspended operations after Rolling Stone ran an article alleging a gang rape at the house. Again, a fake story. “Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.” You used to hear that occasionally in newsrooms, but the difference between then and now is, in the old days, they were kidding. Now, not so much. As the UVA rape story in the rag known as Rolling...

Mark the date, David Letterman fans: May 20 will be his final edition of "The Late Show." CBS announced the finale date on Wednesday, a full five months before it will take place. Letterman announced his retirement plans back in April, but did not specify a date. "It's going to be tough to say goodbye, but I know we will all cherish the shows leading up to Dave's final broadcast in May," CBS CEO Les Moonves said in a statement. The network is planning a triumphant departure for the acclaimed late-night host, who will be succeeded by Stephen Colbert of...

Judicial Watch reports that the Obama administration has turned over about 42,000 pages of documents related to the Fast and Furious scandal. The administration was forced to turn the documents over to Judicial Watch in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. Judicial Watch is posting them on its web site. The administration turned them over on November 18, 2014. One of the documents provides smoking gun proof that the Obama White House and the Eric Holder Justice Department colluded to get CBS News to block reporter Sharyl Attkisson. Attkisson was one of the few mainstream media reporters who paid any...

CBS News Chairman Jeff Fager, who has been running the network’s news division along with “60 Minutes” for the past four years, said Thursday that he’s stepping down from the chief executive role to concentrate on the newsmagazine. […] While Fager didn’t succeed in lifting the “CBS Evening News” and “CBS This Morning” out of third place in the ratings, he set each program in a clear thematic direction with a harder, more traditional news broadcast than its rivals. Fager installed Scott Pelley as the evening news anchor and recently hired former NBC News President Steve Capus to run the...

President Barack Obama will finally be making public tomorrow night what his plan is to overhaul immigration. However, while his primetime speech will postpone part of the 15th annual Latin Grammys, it will not be covered by most of the Big 4 – if any of them. The administration announced today that POTUS will be speaking live from the White House at 8 PM ET on Thursday. ABC has the fall finale for Grey’s Anatomy on at that time while CBS has ratings powerhouse The Big Bang Theory, NBC has reality show The Biggest Loser and Fox has Bones. As...

Has the network news been neglecting the recent comments by MIT economist Jonathan Gruber? NBC, CBS and ABC haven’t covered the story a dozen times, leading to questions of media bias, but “Meet The Press” host Chuck Todd offers an understanding of why this is the case. [Snip] “It’s a political story,” said Todd on Gruber’s comments. “Network news, in general, hasn’t be covering the political back and forth of Washington a lot lately."

I keep this calendar on my desk, and while I don't look at it very often I notice that this Wednesday is Veterans Day. It's one of ten federal holidays that we have. Well, I'm a veteran but I hate that name. Considering that we aren't technically at war now, there's an awful lot about war in the news, too, even when it's not something like Veterans Day. I suppose that's because there's so much fighting in the world. There are half a dozen small wars going on right now, some of them in places most of us have never...

NEW YORK (AP) — Lara Logan of CBS News is being quarantined in a South Africa hotel for three weeks as a precaution after visiting an American-run hospital treating Ebola patients in Liberia for a “60 Minutes” report that aired Sunday. CBS said Monday that Logan’s 21-day self-quarantine will end this Friday. Neither Logan nor the four other CBS employees in South Africa have shown any sign that they are infected with the deadly Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/nov/10/lara-logan-cbs-quarantined-after-ebola-report/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS#ixzz3IhKCZ2XV Follow us: @washtimes on NEW YORK (AP) — Lara Logan of CBS News is being quarantined in a South Africa hotel for three...

Sunday on Fox News Channel's "MediaBuzz," investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson told the story of CBS executives intentionally hiding a clip from the day after the Benghazi attacks with President Barack Obama refusing to admit Benghazi was a terrorist attack. ... after the second 2012 debate, it became a big issue whether or not the president had or had not referred to Benghazi attacks as terrorist attacks.

Forget about polar vortex as an excuse for how global warming is causing extreme cold weather. A brave new word seems to have replaced it: "bombogenesis." The most enthusiastic promoter of bombogenesis in the mainstream media is non climate expert, physicist Michio Kaku. Although Kaku previously used the polar vortex excuse frequently, he has now enthusiastically embraced "bombogenesis" as you can see in his CBS This Morning report below which he delivers in such apocalyptic terms that he claims the weather will be so extreme later this week that the temperature drop will last most of the rest of this...

U.S. President Barack Obama defended his plan to use executive powers to implement some immigration reforms, saying in an interview broadcast on Sunday he had waited long enough for Congress to act. Obama told congressional leaders on Friday he would try to ease some restrictions on undocumented immigrants, despite warnings from Republican leaders that such actions would "poison the well" or would be "a red flag in front of a bull". -snip- "We don't have the capacity to deport 11 million people -- everybody agrees on that," he said.

The “most expensive election in history.” Our democracy is being “bought and sold.” This election, “debased by money, shames us all.” These are some of the recent expressions of outrage about what the Center for Responsive Politicsestimates to have been $3.67 billion spent for federal offices during the 2014 midterms. Two days before the election on “Face the Nation,” CBS’s Bob Schieffer asked viewers to name one item whose costs have gone up as much over time as campaigns. That’s easy. While campaign spending soared to $3.67 billion this year from $1.6 billion in 1998, federal government spending rose 5%...

When questioned about openly homosexual football player Michael Sam, Pro Football Hall of Famer and CBS Sports analyst Deion Sanders said that gay “could be” a choice and added that, “The God I know don’t make mistakes.” In a Nov. 7 interview preview on ORA.tv, an online program, host Larry King asked Sanders what he thought about Michael Sam, who was drafted by the St. Louis Rams and later released, and then picked for the Dallas Cowboys practice squad and not long thereafter also released. Sanders, who is also a commentator for the NFL Network, said, “You know what, I...

On Wednesday's CBS This Morning, co-host Norah O'Donnell fretted that the newly elected Republican Congress would dare to pass legislation: "If you look at a number of these new senators, they're quite conservative. Why wouldn't they go along with what Rand Paul has said? They're gonna send bills up to the President, as he told Charlie Rose last night, 'We're going to keep sending bills up to the President and we'll see whether the President wants to work with us or not.' Is the President going to be forced to veto a bunch of bills?" In response, political director John...

Fox News obliterated its cable news competition during Tuesday night's election coverage, and did so by humiliating margins. However, co-hosts Megyn Kelly and Bret Baier not only vanquished CNN and MSNBC into oblivion, the dynamic duo also beat their broadcast network competition -- in both total viewers and the all-important 25-54 age demo: According to Nielsen Media Research, Fox News Channel beat CNN, MSNBC, CBS, NBC and ABC's coverage in both total viewers and in the 25-to-54-year-old demographic. Co-anchored by Bret Baier and Megyn Kelly, the channel's election coverage averaged 6.3 million viewers during prime time. CNN was the second...

Wednesday during his post-election press conference CBS News' chief White House correspondent Major Garrett took on President Barack Obama over his insistence he will can only accept the senate version of immigration bill or go ahead with his executive amnesty. Garret pressed the president several times during the nine minute exchange to answer his initial question of, "Let me go back to immigration. Moments before you walked out here, sir, Mitch McConnell said, and I quote, that if you, in fact, use your executive authority to legalize a certain number of millions of undocumented workers, it would poison the well,...